


On the Verge

by lemonthea



Category: A3! (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Spoilers for Act 10 of A3!, as a treat, izumi can have a little bit of emotional vulnerability, no beta we die like my initial approval of yukio, this is literally just izumi finally letting herself understand that it's okay to be angry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:01:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26777038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonthea/pseuds/lemonthea
Summary: Takes place after the events of Act 10, Chapter 8.Sure, Izumi may have just found out that her father has been completely okay this entire time. And that him abandoning her age seventeen had nothing to do with the yakuza and instead was purely because his acting career had once again come first. But it's fine. She's fine. Besides, there's a play to be put together and it's far more important.Sakyo isn't so sure.(Or: Yukio Tachibana is a brilliant director but maybe he's not such a good dad and with the help of Sakyo, Izumi gives herself a moment to unpack that.)
Relationships: Furuichi Sakyou/Tachibana Izumi (implied), Tachibana Izumi & Tachibana Yukio
Comments: 4
Kudos: 58





	On the Verge

Your name is Izumi Tachibana and you’re tired. Why wouldn’t you be? Anyone would be exhausted after hearing what you just had (and then having to relay the bare bones of it to the troupe in an impromptu meeting). It’s certainly a comfortable exhaustion; you’ve been aching to hear something along those lines for a full ten years, but the energy drains itself from you regardless.

You weren’t expecting Sakyo to come knocking on your door after most of the troupe had already gone to sleep.

“Is something wrong, Sakyo-san?” Silence. He looks at you closely, eyebrows furrowed.

“I’m worried about you.” He says it so plainly that for a moment you really don’t know how to respond. Sakyo usually isn’t the type to openly check up on others, and although the two of you have been talking more often, it’s still odd for him to openly state his feelings and even more odd for them to be concerning somebody else. Least of all someone like you, who doesn’t need to be worried about.

“Worried? You don’t need to worry about me, it’s like I said earlier: I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?” __Dad is alive. It’s all okay now__. An easy smile finds its way onto your features. It really is okay.

“I know that, Tachibana. But I don’t believe you.” The way Sakyo looks at you is heavily reminiscent of how he might look at Taichi after he’d caught him not paying attention to a lecture. As if you’re completely missing the point he’s putting effort into expressing. But that’s wrong, Sakyo seems to be the one who isn’t understanding.

“Don’t be silly, I’m fine. Thank you though.” You’re not sure how else to answer him. Why wouldn’t he believe you? It’s true, you’re perfectly alright.

“And you’re sure? You might’ve said you couldn’t explain what Yuzo told you but your secret is safe with me.” You don’t doubt that from a Yakuza. 

“No, I’m-”

“Stop being so stubborn, geez. You don’t need to lie on my account.”

The whole situation feels so odd that you don’t know what else to do other than stand there and stare at him. Maybe it would be worth talking to him? It’s unnecessary but at the very least clueing Sakyo in on the full truth couldn’t hurt, could it?

“...” You’re taking too long to respond. “If that’s really the case, then I’ll leave.” He seems uncertain but no doubt also fears that he’s overstayed his welcome.

… 

You aren’t sure why but the realisation that he’s about to leave makes you feel frantic. Your stomach twists. “Wait.” __I suppose just telling Sakyo can’t hurt__.

And you do. You tell him that about Kusumi’s plagiarism and Yukio’s deal with the Fleur Award trustees and how Yuzo managed to keep in contact with him the whole time. Sakyo doesn’t interrupt even once, in fact he seems fairly content to just listen to you. It feels jarring and unnatural somehow and yet you can’t bring yourself to stop until you’ve run out of things to say. Once you finish, there’s an odd silence and you find yourself itching to turn the conversation back over to him. _How’s he doing? Does he want to talk? Can you help him?_

But Sakyo seems to have collected himself fairly easily, which you suppose you should have expected, and he responds before you get the chance to ask.

“And you’re okay with that?” Okay? Of course you’re okay. All you really feel is gratitude. Your father is alive, after all, and you’re with your own troupe now and you couldn’t be happier, really. Surely this is more than enough. And you know this, and you appreciate every part of it but... 

_But what_?

You may have lost your father at seventeen years old without ever getting the chance to say goodbye. You may have spent an uncomfortably large portion of your life afraid that he was gone forever, or that he could be dead and you wouldn’t even know. You may have cried alone for so many nights that you’ve lost count, because your mother was already working _so hard_ and you didn’t want to burden her with too many of your problems. You may have followed a letter (which had turned out to be from a stranger) to a theatre you could only just about recognise from your childhood. You may have threatened to jump in front of an excavator, you may have lied through your teeth to a yakuza who could easily have you wiped off of the planet and you may have even dragged a homeless person into joining a dying theatre. All partially due to the fact that you haven’t seen your father in a decade.

But you know it’s fine. Of course it’s fine; none of the ex-members of Mankai seem all that bothered and really they’re the ones who should be the most hurt. They were his friends, the people closest to him and the ones who must have been hit hardest by the loss. After all, your father spent most of your childhood with them rather than you. If they could cope, Yukio Tachibana’s forgotten daughter easily could. And you were seventeen at the time, basically an adult anyway. At least that’s what your mother said. And she was right, of course, you could live without a father at seventeen just fine and you certainly have.

“You’re so strong”, your mother often tells you. Of course you are, you’re always strong because there isn’t really anything to be hurt about and she needs you more than you need her. Being strong is your purpose.

You want to tell Sakyo that too but it feels pathetic to say such a thing yourself. But you need him to know: you may have just told him about your father but you don’t need help. There’s nothing for him to help you __with__ , you’re perfectly capable of working through these feelings yourself. Not that you really feel much anyway.

“It’s fine. As long as Dad is well and safe, everything is okay.”

When you finally heard the truth, those feelings remained very much the same. Well, other than an incredible sense of relief and the feeling that a metaphorical weight has been taken from your shoulders. You waited an entire decade to find out that your father was alive and in fact not missing, nor was he being hunted down by yakuza. All the fear you had felt over those ten years was now meaningless, and that means it doesn’t matter, does it? All that matters is that Yukio Tachibana is alive and realistically the only thing that was ever keeping him away from you was a selfish script writer’s desperate attempts to live up to his own expectations.

Well. Really it was just that when given the options of either continuing his acting career or staying with his daughter and wife, Yukio Tachibana had chosen the former.

As a director, you can only understand the love your father must have for acting through the members of your troupe. And you can see how important it is to them, so on some level you can begin to comprehend just how much acting meant to him. You know that he lived and breathed theatre, that it was everything to him and that it would be selfish to want to stand in the way of such a thing. 

... but deep down you had still hoped that, to Yukio, family was more important.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to you. Really, it shouldn’t. Even when Yukio __was__ around, all that mattered was the stage. You’d accepted it from a young age; you would always be second best and everything that involved your father also involved acting. It was one of the main reasons you took up theatre, after all. You wanted to make him happy and if becoming an actor was the only thing you could do for him, then you’d just have to do it. Although it didn’t exactly turn out as you’d hoped, both in that taking up acting didn’t magically allow Yukio more time to spend with you and that eventually you were forced to accept that you had no real future in performing. At the time, your father had reassured you that acting wasn’t for everyone, but he didn’t seem to understand that theatre hadn’t been what was important to you anyway; _he was_. And yet. Even if you and your father hadn’t interacted often and you didn’t always understand each other, there still had to be a connection, didn’t there? Despite everything, you’d always thought there was.

And yet he couldn’t even call you? Sure, Yuzo had said that the terms of the agreement meant that he wasn’t allowed to contact his troupe, but you and your mother had nothing to do with the theatre industry at the time. Not to mention the fact that you can’t picture the Fleur Award trustees seriously expecting Yukio to leave his wife and daughter… and he’d been willing to break their rules for Yuzo. Granted, Yuzo had long since planned to leave the troupe so he was the safest bet out of the ex-troupe members, but how could that be any less dangerous than contacting _you_? You hadn’t had anything to do with Mankai after he left until Matsukawa had sent you that letter. You hadn’t even lived in the area, nor did you have any connection with the ex-members.

Couldn’t you have at least been allowed to talk to him too? Just once? You’d never even gotten to say goodbye.

“It’s okay to be angry.” Sakyo says and all of a sudden you’re at a loss for words because you realise that there’s an odd pressure in your chest. And you think that maybe it’s been there for a while now, but you’re so used to swallowing it down that you really can’t tell. You want to tell him that you aren’t angry; you don’t __get__ angry but if you open your mouth you think you actually might cry and you don’t quite know why but you do know that it can’t happen. Instead, you just stare at him and for a few seconds he stares back and all you can feel is the dead air between you. For a moment you allow yourself to entertain the thought.

Maybe this __is__ anger. Who’s to say? You don’t want the feeling to be there; anger only ever leads to arguing and you can’t bring yourself to like any part of that. Your mother is and always has been an easy to anger person and you love her, more than anything, but you’re glad you aren’t the same. Of course you aren’t. You know what your mother is like; the mildest inconvenience could easily spark a long string of complaints and those always lead to raised voices and before you’d know it she would be starting an argument. You can recall that she argued with your father too, but you don’t quite remember the specifics other than often wishing they would just __stop__. Would he shout back or would he play the part of the gentle mediator like his daughter always did? You don’t know how anything would get resolved at least one cool head but, from the way you’ve heard your father’s ex troupe mates talk about him, nothing would really surprise you. 

Your father certainly seems like a cool headed person. He was willing to suffer the consequences for Kusumi Ikaruga’s ‘mistake’ and that really was something that made you proud to be known as his daughter.

But because of that mistake, you spent ten years of your life without a father and the possibility that you’ll have to go the rest of it the same way seems uncomfortably likely at this rate.

Maybe that would be different if it had meant anything, and in an ideal world it would. However, the reality was that Kusumi Ikaruga was a lying coward and he had just done the same thing all over again, this time to another theatre.

And, what, Yuzo and your mother knew about this? 

You remember the one single time you’d confided in your mother that you were afraid your father was gone forever. You were eighteen and you’d cracked. Protecting your mother was still your top priority, so you had done your best to be gentle about it, pretending to only be asking out of curiosity. (Whether she believed that or not considering your acting skills you still don’t know.) You’d also avoided going into detail out of fear of scaring her, but in reality it had been an entire year after his disappearance. You had started to wonder if he really was dead, because seventeen year old you knew he loved you, and the only reason you could think of that would keep him away for so long was if his life was in danger. At the time, your mother had looked you dead in the eyes and told you that she didn’t know where your father was and she didn’t want to. Was telling you the truth that hard?

And Yuzo had even talked to your father in between his check ups on the troupe. He knew you’d come to the theatre after all those years, still with some belief left, and yet he hadn’t been able to confirm what you’d be pinning your hopes on. Surely he could have said _something_.

Regardless. This can’t be __anger__. Can it? You don’t really know how you’d feel if you were truly angry. You have your moments, like everyone else does, and you certainly have felt it but only when it’s absolutely necessary. Your job is to be calm. In a world like this, where there’s suffering at every fork in the road, someone has to be reliable. Somebody has to be the calm mediator, the good listener, never with any needs of their own and always prepared to hear someone out.

So that’s what you try to do, because you don’t want anybody in your troupe to ever feel scared, lonely or unloved. Nobody has ever really done the same for you but you know it’s fine because you don’t need it and they don’t see the same world you do. And because you haven’t suffered like they have, they shouldn’t have to help alleviate your pain on top of their own.

So how are you supposed to react to Sakyo, of all people, treating you like this?

“Izumi.” __He said your name__. Your actual name. You can’t remember the last time you heard it from his lips and despite how minuscule the gesture is you can feel the emotion dangerously welling up in your chest.

“You don’t have to hold it together.” But you __do__ , and you have to so badly. You have to be strong because nobody else is and they all need you. And because you need them to need you, so that you can prove you’re worthy and you might have a fighting chance of not being left behind. You __need__ to be useful to everyone else, because they deserve to have at least one person in their lives who doesn’t hurt them.

That’s how it’s always been. It was like that when your father disappeared and your suddenly single mother was all you had. It was like that when your entire theatre company only consisted of you, an unbelievably clueless manager, a bird and the newly formed Spring troupe and you needed to be the one who could vouch for everything going exactly as planned, even though in reality you were just as scared and desperate as they were.

All of a sudden you feel an awful tightening sensation on your head, like someone is standing above you with a clamp and screwing it shut as tightly as they can. You’ve had your fair share of headaches before but this is worse; the sensation encompasses your entire head and even though you try you can’t seem to find the right muscles to relax to make it stop.

It hurts. You feel the tightness around your head and the pressure in your chest and the back of your throat burns with them. Everything inside of you seems to be straining to keep the feelings deep down, where they belong, and the last thing you could be capable of is speaking to Sakyo.

Despite the fact that you have yet to say a word and he must be more than uncomfortable by now, Sakyo seems determined and he reaches for your hand.

“Izumi.” He says your name again. You feel the warmth of his fingers against yours and it swallows you whole.

And something within you just breaks. The strange tension still constricts your body but you can feel it cracking and through those cracks come harsh sobs.

You don’t mean to cry in front of Sakyo. 

It doesn’t really feel good, like you would have expected. It’s just a comfortable sense of relief, as if crying in Sakyo’s arms is something you should have done a long time ago. You can tell he doesn’t know what to do and it doesn’t surprise you but he does slowly begin to stroke your hair. The gesture is uncharacteristically gentle and it feels almost jarring.

“I’m sorry.” You find yourself mumbling against his shoulder. “I feel bad.” There’s no response but Sakyo doesn’t halt his movement. His jacket is beyond damp now from all the crying and you wonder if it soaked through to his shoulder.

“I’m sorry.” You say again.

“Don’t be a bother. You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

The urge to disagree with him rises up in your throat. You want to say that you should be sorry, that you have too much to __be__ sorry for.

You feel so incredibly guilty for harbouring so much anger to those who were just trying to protect you. Your mother lied but she must have had her reasons and you can’t really blame Yuzo for not wanting to be the one to tell you after barely even meeting you. You love them, you really do. Your mother stayed by your side no matter what and she did her best to raise you alone. When it came to your father she may not have been the most understanding, but whenever you needed support for anything else she was at least there for you. 

Is it really okay for you to feel this way? Shouldn’t you be considering their feelings more? You want to ask Sakyo too, as the itch to go back to the natural order of things crawls inside of you once more.

But then you look at him again and you understand. And you don’t say any of it. Because for now, in this dorm room, the only feelings that matter are your own. Just this once.

As for your father… you still don’t understand what your feelings are trying to tell you. Some part of you gets the feeling that he must have done what he thought was best, but the pain holds you back from really processing whether you’re happy about that. You can at least now admit that you’re hurt; that his actions, regardless of intent, broke your heart and you’ve been trying to operate without fixing it for a long time. 

You break the silence with a confession.

“I don’t know what I’ll do if he really does show up for the performance. It’s been so long that I’m not sure how to react.” And really, you don’t. It was part of the reason why you told Reni to go see him instead of you, although there certainly were remains of a strong bond there that Reni seemed aching to pursue. Other than that, you thought that by giving the chance to someone else, you could hold off seeing and having to face him for a little longer.

If you do see him, that is, since Yuzo didn’t seem too hopeful that he would be able to do anything other than practice with the ex leaders and Reni. 

“... If he makes you cry, I’ll kill him.” You laugh at that. A genuine warmth bubbles up in your chest and spreads through your body. If only you could spend more time with Sakyo like this.

“It’s getting late. I’ll head back.”

“You can stay here?”

“Unless you want that shitty brat to announce it to the entire dorm tomorrow, I’d rather not.” Dodging the question, huh. A part of you wants to cling to his arm and make him stay, but the more mature part of you knows you have to leave it there. Though you wonder why that image seems so familiar.

“Thank you, Sakyo.”

You smile at him again as he leaves.

And, for the first time in a while, the only person you're smiling for is yourself.


End file.
